Gallery 16 is pleased to present “Golden Prisn,” a two-person exhibition from longtime partners Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker. This will be the San Francisco-based artists’ fourth showing with the gallery. Cliff and Scott have been important fixtures in the San Francisco arts scene for 25 years.

During the artists three decades as residents of San Francisco’s Mission District, they have witnessed significant change. For Golden Prisn, the artist's marry the word “prism” with the concept of the Gilded Cage or “Golden Jail.”

Describing a situation as paradoxically valuable and trapping, the Golden Jail limits the inhabitant, making any alternative to the current situation comparatively worse. The introduction of the Prism into the exhibition’s title promotes an uplifting opportunity to re-interpret the often-told tale of San Francisco’s gentrification through the unifying element of color. White light contains the full spectrum of colors, though only visible through a prism.

In the sense that color does not belong to anyone, Hengst and Hewicker draw inspiration from the ostentatious nature of the everyday world around them. They respond by making works that are largely made from humble materials, their work emphasizes a human touch. It revels in the beauty of the handmade and empathizes a solidarity with the downtrodden and discarded.

Hewicker adds, “In some ways we are stuck in an uncertain and unstable place, but it creates this urgency that propels us to make work while we still can.”

Hengst's found cardboard paintings and text pieces and Hewicker's brightly saturated abstract paintings and prints, the artists will expand their work into sculptural installation, ceramics and a wall mural. In doing so, the artists seek to activate the gallery space into a charged and inviting color environment, beckoning a creative community to celebrate resilience despite constant waves of change endured by artists in San Francisco.

On Thursday, November 17th, Scott Hewicker invites local luminaries in the art and poetry scenes, including Kevin Killian, Linda Geary and Laurie Reid, for An Evening With The Color Organist—poetry readings and performance inspired by color, accompanied by a trio of electric organists led by Hewicker.

Saturday, December 10th from 8pm, Cliff Hengst performs as Bobby Coupon in Lounge Lessons: A Musical Journey of Life Reflections and Motivation Through Song—a lounge act meets motivational seminar of Hengst’s own creation, first debuting earlier this year in three consecutive sold-out shows at Machine Project in Los Angeles.

Alexandra Phelps
You must be new here You must be nowhere
Peephole Gallery
12 November - 17 December 2016 Reception: 12 November from 7-10 pm
“Time is non-linear. Today, we merely float”
Oakland-based artist Alexandra Phelps presents new video, photography and sculpture for You must be new here, You must be nowhere. Immersed in memory and attempting to preserve or recreate moments past in an effort to remember, Phelps' work approaches a process of personalizing individual experiences. In order to manifest comfort in place and memory, Phelps expands the immaterial process of time through diorama style sculpture, light boxes, soundscapes and video. Sourced from personal routine, ritual and repetition, the work reflects an intimate distance between time and the relational experience of Phelps' inner world.
Alexandra Phelps is a California-bred sculptor, collector, and president of a secret society living in Oakland, CA. She completed her BFA at California College of the Arts in 2015. She is the recipient of several named memorial awards, including the Yozo Hamaguchi Scholarship for Excellence in Printmaking (2014) and the Mary Dorr-Gordon Scholarship for Media (2014). Past exhibitions include Maryland Institute College of Art (2015) and Osaka University of the Arts (2013). If found dead, please turn half of her body in to diamonds and submit the other half to the Smithsonian archives.

Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of recent work by Danäe Anderson and Albert Dicruttalo.

Danäe Anderson forms her visual language through Abstract Expressionism, and the Surrealist explorations of the subconscious mind, myth, and cultures. Her use of free association grants her allowance for chance and accident forming the physicality of the process, marking the human experience. Movement and music vitally inflect the improvised choreography of the paintings.

Albert Dicruttalo relates his most recent stainless steel sculptures to the interplay of contradictions: mysterious but familiar, interior and exterior, concave, and convex, emotional but impassive. These themes are metaphors in his search for resolution or epiphany from the conflicting ideas that accompany the creative process. With no clear beginning or end, the loops, arcs, spheres and cylinders sharply define and envelope space, creating a sense of the infinite and confined.

“My approach is not one of addition – only subtraction. Options are eliminated, details deleted and suppressed. What is left offers a visual resistance...” – Ferdinanda Florence

Ferdinanda Florence’s paintings are emphatically physical, admittedly quiet, and above all pensive. Unlike her previous series which variably focused on the city of Vallejo, her two recent bodies of work Orange Equipment and VELPCo solely focus on two particular buildings, which stand-alone as sentinels in the town. The structures are not adjacent or connected to any other building; they are freestanding with nothing immediately in their vicinity to offer support. Her buildings or totems grip the ground like an old cathedral.

“We live our lives largely inside buildings. I hope to create places where we can exist for a long while among the trees.” – Wynne Hayakawa

Wynne Hayakawa paints to convey her sense of the natural world. Her most recent paintings are a photographic glimpse of the forests in Northern California. With her camera Hayakawa takes to the forests and captures the essence of walking among the trees. She utilizes a slow shutter speed resulting in an abstracted image mainly consisting of light and dark forms. Hayakawa uses these images to begin her painting process with an impressionistic and layered interplay of colors, lights, flatness, and space.

Ferdinanda Florence and Wynne Hayakawa

Jan 4 - Feb 3, 2017 Reception: Wed Jan 4 5pm - 7pm

Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of recent work by Ferdinanda Florence and Wynne Hayakawa.

Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of recent work by Ferdinanda Florence and Wynne Hayakawa. The Opening Reception will be hosted January 4, 2017 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM.

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce Map For A Journey Not Yet Taken, a memorial exhibition of work by Tony Feher on view at the gallery from November 17 through December 16, 2016.

Feher’s unique ability to embrace the significance and potential in the most humble and simple processes was a cornerstone of his formal practice. He was a sculptor who saw beauty, emotional strength, and value in non-precious materials.

Curated by Feher’s close friend, gallery Senior Director Rebecca Camacho, the exhibition highlights three series of visual vignettes, groupings of artworks from different moments throughout Feher’s 30-year career that illustrate an ongoing dialogue thread. Many works are on view publicly for the first time.

A curvy glass jar filled with multi-colored glass marbles, a group of five slim jars containing varying numbers of glass and aluminum foil marbles, two aluminum foil balls resting in the crease where the wall meets the floor, a set of 25 champagne cork wires each holding a unique glass marble, rubber or aluminum foil ball. The first work created in 1987, the last in 2015. For three decades, Feher’s hand and eye returned to a similar set of materials, mining their beauty, elegantly reimagining them to varied, intelligent and poignant ends.

The show is presented in cooperation with Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, where a concurrent exhibition will be on view featuring Feher’s last body of work, a vibrant series of painted reliefs, shown in tandem with notebook sketches that document the artist’s thought process and creative vision. The exhibition is curated by Feher’s close friends and fellow artists Andrea Blum, Nancy Brooks Brody, JoyEpisalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka.

Tony Feher was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1956, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas, and resided in New York City. Feher’s work can be found in important international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to present Viviane Sassen Pikin Slee & Elspeth Diederix In These Shadows, an exhibition of photographic works by two Dutch artists and longtime friends who live and work in Amsterdam. The exhibition opens alongside Viviane Sassen’s participation in the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program, a collaboration between Pier 24 Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and California College of the Arts, where she will be in conversation on Wednesday, November 2nd at 7pm.

Viviane Sassen and Elspeth Diederix first met in an art class as teenagers and have remained close friends throughout their adult lives. While they each came to photography by different routes, both cite their childhood experiences as Europeans living in Africa as formative to their sensibilities, and both create images that challenge the tendency to quickly categorize and make sense of what we see, especially when confronting a photograph. Instead they invite us into worlds that demand a sustained

attentiveness, where novelty and surprise are fully integrated into the surroundings and textures of the everyday, and images and objects resonate with their own strange authority. They also privilege the highly personal and subjective view as the most open-ended approach to their material; whether working at home or abroad, both artists are fine-tuned to the experience of displacement, of finding the familiar in the foreign and vice versa, and create a generous space for what lies between.

Known for her sculptural concern with form and expressive use of color, Viviane Sassen is one of a handful of photographers to move successfully between fashion photography and fine art, letting the two cross-pollinate in ways that are surprising, confusing and often surreal. In both realms, Sassen skillfully creates tension between what is visually explicit and what is covert or inscrutable, and is one of the most compelling contemporary photographers at work today. Casemore Kirkeby’s exhibition features Pikin Slee, a body of work Sassen created in a remote village in Suriname, accessible only via a three-hour canoe journey into the rainforest. Formerly part of a Dutch colony, Pikin Slee was founded by Maroon people, African slaves who escaped the plantations, fled into the woods and made settlements. Sassen was drawn to the village, where the Saramacca community lives without running water, hardly any electricity or the internet and still speaks Dutch, for its complex connection to both the Netherlands and to Africa, where she has made much of her previous work. But Sassen’s approach to this complexity is intimate and pared down, imbued with an elegant restraint that turns everyday sights in the village into offbeat meditations. Shooting mostly in black-and-white, and occasionally in color, Sassen intervened minimally in the daily routines of village life, instead adjusting her own position to allow space for what she found. The result is quiet and nuanced, with all the power of her incisive vision distilled to its most essential elements.

Elspeth Diederix’s photographs appear otherworldly, but in fact they are very much of this world, and since 2009 often created in her “studio garden” in Amsterdam, or underwater in the murky depths off the coast of Holland. Steering clear of post-production trickery, the magic of Diederix’s images is grounded in the physical world of her subjects—flowers combust as if from their own beauty and dandelions dangle in a web of nylon strings. Diederix started out as a painter and, after working in sculpture and installation, circled back to photography as a way to make permanent the fleeting arrangements she created in and around her studio. Photography allowed her a tremendous amount of flexibility to work with ephemeral materials and, when she moved to digital photography, to “paint” again with color and shadow. Informed by the traditions of Dutch still life painting and the reverence for what is not long for this world, Elspeth’s Diederix’s imagery is suffused with mystery and energy that seems generated from within the objects and situations she photographs. They loom like wonderful question marks, a reminder that so much is yet unknown.

Viviane Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam. She first studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Ateliers Arnhem. Her work was first published in avant-garde fashion magazines and is regularly commissioned by prominent designers. Sassen was included in the main exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, in 2013. A retrospective of 17 years of her fashion work, In and Out of Fashion, opened at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, in 2012, accompanied by a book published by Prestel (Munich); the exhibition travelled to the Rencontres d'Arles festival and then the Scottish National Portrait Gallery,

Edinburgh, SCAD museum in Savannah and the Photomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. The book won the Kees Scherer prize for best Dutch photography book of 2011/2.

Sassen was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York's Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. She was one of six artists selected for the 2011 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Solo exhibitions have taken place at FORMA in Milan (2009) and FOAM in Amsterdam (2008), and the ICA in London (2015) among other venues.

Elspeth Diederix was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1971, and raised in Colombia. She studied painting and sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam between 1990 and 1995, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 1998-2000. Photography eventually proved to be the best medium for her to form her ideas; nevertheless, both painting and sculpture have been present in her work since the outset. In 2002, she won the prestigious Prix de Rome Photography award, and her works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the AzkoNobel Art Foundation; and the AMC Art Collection, Amsterdam among others. Her publications include Still Life Submerged (2012), These Things (2005), and Supernatural (2003). The birth of her daughters has brought her focus towards her direct surroundings in recent years, such as the garden of her studio, ‘An experiment in gardening and photography’, that can be followed via the blog Studio Garden. During this period her work has become more organic and tactile, like in the projects Still Life Submerged and Plumeria & Chicory. A fascinating new development, drawing on the same motivation: the revelation of the sublime in the world around us.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Crown Point Press announces “Bruce Conner,” a selection of photoetchings from the Dennis Hopper One Man Show, Volumes I, II, III, published by Crown Point in 1971, 1972, and 1973. The books contain twenty-six prints in total and increase in scale sequentially, resembling nestled accountants’ ledgers when stacked. The exhibition presents thirteen unbound photoetchings and is on display from October 14, 2016 to January 28, 2017.

Kathan Brown, founding director of Crown Point and printer of Conner’s first volume, invited the artist to work at the press in the early 1970s. Conner was interested in improving collages made of nineteenth-century, mass-produced engravings that he had been working on privately for years. Brown suggested the process of photoetching as a way to eliminate the paper edges and increase density. Positive transparencies of the collages were created, and Conner carefully scraped and drew on them to render the paper seams invisible and increase clarity overall. He then heightened the contrast in the prints, especially in the second and third volumes, through a very deep acid bite when etching the plates. By modifying both his source materials and the collages they yielded, Conner disguised the artist’s hand and created new images distanced from collage.

Originally Conner proposed the collages for an exhibition to be called “The Dennis Hopper On-Man Show” to Los Angeles dealer Nicholas Wilder in 1967. His concept would have been complete when Hopper, a friend and fellow artist, visited the gallery and discovered the false attribution. The proposal was rejected by Wilder, and Conner’s vision was not realized until he completed the photoetchings published by Crown Point Press several years later.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was an anti-establishment artist and filmmaker who challenged the status quo throughout his life. Born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933, Conner was educated at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska, and the Brooklyn Art School. He moved to the Bay Area in 1957 where, for over a half century, he created a body of work that fluently crossed media, including painting, assemblage, film, sculpture, collage, and performance. In any medium, his work considered various themes of post-war American society from a growing consumer culture to the anxiety of possible nuclear mass destruction. He exhibited in the United States and Europe, and his work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2000, the Walker Art Center organized a survey exhibition, “2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II,” that traveled to Ft. Worth, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Bruce Conner” is on display in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, October 14, 2016 – January 28, 2017. The gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6. The exhibition is on view concurrently with the retrospective “Bruce Conner: It’s All True” (October 29, 2016 – January 22, 2017) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, located across the street from Crown Point Press. Organized by the SFMoMA with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Bruce Conner: It’s All True” opened in New York this past summer.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Crown Point Press announces “Jacqueline Humphries,” an exhibition of new prints by New York-based painter Humphries. On view December 7 to January 28, it presents ten etchings made predominantly in the aquatint technique, an intaglio process in which Crown Point has exceptional expertise. The ten prints by Humphries are a new body of work that build on her recently developed vocabulary of stenciled grids, emojis, and gestural abstraction. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 12, from 6-8pm.

Jacqueline Humphries worked in the Crown Point studio earlier this fall to make etchings for the first time. Master Printer Sam Carr-Prindle helped her incorporate custom-made stencils from her studio in New York into copper plates mainly by using a modified sugar lift aquatint technique. In the “: : : : :” print, she pushed a thick sugar paste through the stencil and allowed the paste to squish past the stencil at times, adding an element of gestural abstraction to the formal grid. Humphries made multiple plates using this process and combined them with others to complete the prints. Her layering of plates is similar to her painting process. “It’s almost like I’m breeding paintings more than painting them,” Humphries has said. “The paintings kind of reproduce other paintings.” In one print she made five plates to finish the work.

In October, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the first alphabet of emojis dating to 1999, recognizing the importance of this modern language. Humphries has been working with emojis in her paintings since 2014 and continues to use them in her new etchings. In the “Smiling Cat Emoji” print, she uses a stencil grid of a smiling cat emoji as the dominant backdrop to the print. In the “:) :)” print, she simply layers two emoticons over her abstract marks.
Also on view are etchings by Mary Heilmann, Pat Steir, and Charline von Heyl, three abstract painters who are contemporary peers of Humphries. While these four female artists work within a similar abstract language, they each use different styles and tools to take the medium of painting to its current place in art.

Jacqueline Humphries is an abstract painter who conceptually connects her work to the cultural and social dialogue of today. Born in 1960 to a family of artists in New Orleans, Humphries has lived and worked in New York since the 1980s. She attended the Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1985 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, in 1986. Through layering, scraping, and smearing, Humphries focuses on motion and light to create energy that bounces back and forth between her abstract, gestural canvases and the viewer. Her work is in the permanent collections the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern, London. Humphries participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

“Jacqueline Humphries” is on display in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, December 7, 2016 – January 28, 2017. On view at Crown Point concurrently is “Bruce Conner,” an exhibition of photoetchings dating to the 1970s and published by the press. The gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.

Mouth moves in time with the play though no sounds come out.
Treading lightly so as to not break the tension between cast and audience.
Staring from the wings like a beast just beyond the light of one’s campfire, eyes aglow.

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Thinking back to rehearsal it is hard to imagine this going any other way. Good at rote memorization, I had not only the planned scene ready but the whole play (it a classic, easy to source as a paperback or pdf). But to what end? Easily the least imposing of the hopefuls as a body in space, no amount of mnemonic dexterity could possibly have gotten me on the stage, at least not directly (as my position waiting in the wings is merely a bad flu or twisted ankle away from the footlights). I’m just slightly less-so in enough respects to make the casting of they instead of me a given. And it’s not as if I’m good at acting, not really anyway. It is as if my body knows this character is not it, not really, and refuses to go along with the charade. I feel like two bodies tied together at the wrists, elbows, knees etc., the one a conjured up ghost-me ‘performing’ and the other my stubborn, petulant, corporeal self – it amounting to a shoddy puppeteer’s work which reads as the desired motion while never fooling anyone, especially myself. Like a starling (a bird), the name approximating some diminutive sun. Or those last three or four in an Olympic race, well out of the medals, perhaps the fifth, sixth, and seventh best at a given activity in a world of seven billion and yet reduced to observers albeit observers with a very specific view of the proceedings.

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I serve on-call, but nevertheless I attend the play nightly, usually backstage – the drama never fails to wring a tear from my eye both when the audience, knowing something the characters haven’t quite come around to yet, cries, and when the characters themselves reach the tragic revelation of the third act. I’ve realized I’m dressing more and more like the character would dress. Not in the scenes depicted mind you, but were they to walk off the stage and somehow into the world, returning to some home patiently awaiting their arrival, eat, drink a little to take the edge off what was a pretty eventful (re: theatre-worthy) series of events, watch some tv, go to sleep, and awaken directly into a routine of cleaning and dressing, they would naturally don something similar to what I am wearing. Were they, instead of journeying to a job or otherwise move on with their lives, to go straight back to the theatre, much like I would do, would they, in second-day clothes, perform a second-day’s play, continuing where yesterday’s left off? The original piece offers a relatively un-avant garde tidy ending – left without crisis, would this sequel drift into hyperrealism? And what’s more, would I somehow know the lines? My jaw and tongue grow alien, scrabbling at the air in time with this second-day’s tête-à-tête, the actors as much participating in a logical progression from the end of the play as exercising a frightening adeptness at controlling this marionette-me offstage.

Ever Gold [Projects] presents Mark Flood’s Paintings from the War for Social Justice, an exhibition of decorative wall hangings that obliquely acknowledge ongoing struggles.

These struggles provide a context for the humorlessness of contemporary art, and a plausible excuse for its sad downward spiral.

Listen up you worthless pieces of shit, learn how to free yourself from your toxic messages and heal the hurt inside that’s keeping you from giving yourself the self-love and self-acceptance you deserve.

Part of unlearning the violence and abuse of patriarchy that is so deeply ingrained in mainstream masculinities in the US means cultivating different ways of being, supplanting the unhealthy and destructive patterns with new masculinities that can more closely align with feminist and non-violent values.

Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things an exhibit could do.

It may also intensify the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf art communities these days, allowing art-maven minds to open more widely, like a well-fisted human anus, to new ideas.

The interactive installation—created using two tons of reclaimed murder-victim corpses—encourages passersby to permit their murder-inclined inner child to create a collaborative grotesquerie of death.

The project has previously been enacted in public squares in Tirana, Oslo, and Copenhagen; this installation marks its first time in North America.

To jump-start the process, ten of the city’s most notorious mutilation murderers contributed mutilated corpses to a series of art environments/butcher shops, which range from mainstream neighborhood-friendly jack-shacks to secretive “black” military torture-dungeons.

“Everyone can come and mutilate their own victims, male and female,” Flood told artnet News in an exclusive video interview, “We’re expecting lots of people coming . . . to just build and destroy and rebuild their ideal necrophiliac fantasy corpse. Which is actually what’s happening right now, on campuses all around America, and in the ongoing presidential race.”

“Get involved, and you have a great chance of not just building relationships with other like-minded people, but also gaining important leadership experience!”

Indeed, the project’s proximity to ongoing mutilation murders in the Mission is no accident. “We really wanted the piece to be here so this pseudo-community can be inspired by what’s happening,” Flood says, “We hope it will be a way of creating a platform for art-lovers to get together and share their ideas about sex and death and rearranging the human body.”

During the exhibit, dead San Francisco residents, who no longer have sexual feelings nor participate in the affairs of the living, can attend a series of retreats where art-lovers who “self-identify as blind” can confront their own “blindness.”

“Examining Blindness: Retreats for Corpses Who Self-Identify as Blind” is “specifically for blind corpses.”

Somewhere on the premises, a patch of skin is tattooed with the question, “How does blindness impact you?”

According to unidentified “gods” of creativity, the self-identifying blind who attend the retreat will come to “recognize and understand blindness from an individual experience” and have the opportunity to “conceptualize and articulate blindness from a personal and systematic lens, as well as the impact of blindness on the dead community and beyond.”

“If we don’t cherish these things, we lose a bit of our history,” the god said, “If you lose your history, you lose a bit of yourself, really.”

The self-identifying dead also tackled tough questions such as “What does it mean to be dead?” and “How does death impact you?”

At the heart of every experience is a story waiting to be told.

The exhibit features testimonials from past lovers of art, who praised the event as a “depressing waste of time.”

[About Mark Flood]
Mark Flood is an American artist. Mark Flood is the collective identity enacted by a group of international artists, poets, musicians and deadbeats. Mark Flood is somebody, formerly nobody, who did something somewhere, formerly nowhere. Mark Flood was born a while back and will cease to exist when you stop reading this.

In the exhibition MESALINAS OPERATICAS, Omar Chacon has created luminous and visually tactile abstract paintings that continue his exploration of color and process.

Chacon begins by pouring a mixture of acrylic paint and medium onto a surface to dry. He sees each pour as a unique and individual brushstroke that he then arranges on a canvas to create his paintings. He has invented his own paint formula - and found innovative ways to build layers, color combinations and compositions.

Using reds, yellows, oranges and turquoise blues, Chacon composes the lyrical Opera series. A vibrant orchestration of colors and patterns reminiscent of musical notes on a page.
Never far from his Colombian roots he fantasizes about a tropical opera - merging the old and the new worlds. An autochthonous cultural event and experience that would feed the soul.

In paintings such as Variation de Mesalina we get an insight into Chacon’s fascination with the Roman Empire. Its power, grandeur, excesses and elegance. Iconic Roman symbols like Emperor Claudius, temptress Mesalina and Bacchus the god of wine, inspired him to make a series of monochrome paintings. The monochromes reduce painting to the basics and focus attention on singular color, process and texture. Saturated hues associated with the royal empire deliver results that are powerful and seductive.

On view through December 17th, 2016

Omar Chacon was born in Bogota Colombia in 1979. He received an MA from Ringling College of Art and Design and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY. His work has been exhibited internationally in cities such as New York City, Milan and Mexico City.

Crystal Liu constructs landscapes that are metaphors for her emotional states. In large-scale paintings on paper that incorporate her adaptation of the technique of marbleized paper along with watercolor and metallic pigments, the fundamental elements of earth and sky enact narratives of conflict, entrapment, longing, and precarious hope.

There are echoes of the centuries-old tradition of Chinese ink brush painting in the swirls of marbleized black ink and the efficient distillation of line, form and color into evocative depictions of stone, mountain ranges, and subterranean cross-sections of earth. Metallic gold pigment provides a stark contrast in the form of a moon and hundreds of stars, which become the protagonists in an epic odyssey of faith and tenacity against the daunting forces of reality.

Crystal Liu's parents emigrated from China to Toronto, Canada, where she was born in 1980. Liu majored in photography at the Ontario College of Art & Design and received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She resides in San Francisco.

Drawing from sources as diverse as African mudcloth, Japanese shibori, and Native American basket weavings, Julie Chang investigates how identities are constructed, engaging patterns to explore the personal and political forces that shape and misshape our lives. Chang will create a work directly on the walls and floor of the gallery as well as present a series of large-scale paintings on paper.

The patterns in woven textiles and baskets reflect a rich multiplicity of traditions, while the elemental forms in each are common to many cultures across the globe. Similarly, the process of weaving embodies paradox in its unification of opposites: the warp and the weft, one vertical and one horizontal thread, one stretched taut and one in undulating motion.

Taking her cue from the visual and technical components of weaving, Chang’s forms freely float and then gather and intertwine. Shapes migrate and cross boundaries, transformed by encounters with other forms. Arrivals, foreignness, dislocation, struggle and integration reference hidden histories both personal and universal.

In many countries and cultures today, weaving remains a vital craft, reflecting vibrant traditions while encumbered by the politics of gender, race and class. Taking her identity as a Chinese American woman as a starting point, Chang explores the formal systems and invented structures in which we operate: rules, constraints, and possibilities made visible and material.

Julie Chang was born in Parkridge, Illinois and raised in Orange County, California. She received her MFA from Stanford University in 2007. As one of five artists chosen to create a permanent art installation for the new San Francisco Transbay Transit Center, she is designing 20,000 square feet of terrazzo floor for the Grand Hall.

Sam Perry’s carved wood sculptures are testaments to the passage of time and are imbued with a respect for craft and precision. Sourced from fallen trees, the wood has already lived a lifetime before Perry begins transforming it into sculpture. With patience and precision, Perry carves, sands, polishes, and splines with an awareness of the material’s history and a desire to “find” the sculpture hidden within the bole. “Looking at a fallen tree is like observing a person and wondering about their past,” says Perry, a sentiment reflecting both his careful consideration as an artist and his deep reverence for his chosen material.

The temptation to anthropomorphize is strong when looking at Perry’s sculptures, and becomes profound in the context of the breadth of his work. The grounded solidity of the most recent pieces feels mature, settled, close to the earth; they are often self-contained, inward, and reflective. This is evident in loops curving in on themselves, melding together to form autonomous units, and in individual forms overlapping to create new ones. This differs from the sense of searching found in some of his earlier works which tend to reach outward in questioning gestures to the space around them. While the investigation continues, a sense of maturity has been realized through time and experience.

Sam Perry was born in Kailua, Hawai’i where he worked as a child in his father’s canoe shop. Originally working in ceramics, he received both his BFA (1986) and MFA (1990) from California College of Arts and Crafts. After graduating, he took a position as studio assistant to Viola Frey, which he maintained for over 20 years. His sculptures are included in the collections of the di Rosa Preserve and the Runnymede Sculpture Farm. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Ferguson's work is an interpretation, via abstraction, of space and the flexible nature of perception. Using pattern and color, along with a range of process-driven approaches and modern materials, Ferguson creates works based on mathematical puzzles and pattern variations that land somewhere at the intersection of painting, sculpture and printmaking. The results are beautiful works that reflect the artist's intuitive use of geometry and her reverence for the purposely imperfect.

Ferguson begins with a digital file. What follows is both a formal and conceptual quest to make the image less “clean and tight.” Using an improvisational process of fracturing, degrading, and abstracting the image, Ferguson finds her flaws. A build up of glitches is created through the purposeful “non-registration” and the result is clear - it's a hand made thing that embraces its inherent materiality and celebrates the irregular and the accidental.

Like the errors that elevate a Persian rug's presence - the glitches in the work telegraph loud and clear these are made by hand.

Elise Ferguson was born in Richmond, VA and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Luhring Augustine, Andrew Kreps, CRG Gallery, Team Gallery, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. She has had solo and two person shows at Halsey McKay, Envoy Gallery and Illinois State University – University Galleries. She has had residencies at Dieu Donne Papermill, MacDowell Colony and was included and received an exhibition grant for EAST International in Norwich, England. She received her MFA at The University of Illinois at Chicago in 1995 and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.